


the other half of the summer

by transversely



Category: Ookiku Furikabutte | Big Windup!
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-17
Updated: 2014-07-17
Packaged: 2018-02-09 07:33:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1974291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transversely/pseuds/transversely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day after the Bijou game, Kikue saw Miwako at the batting cages with her everpresent umbrella (inside an air-conditioned room! was she trying to show off her umbrella, its specially commissioned silk coverlet with embroidery in plasticine beads and the delicate, doll-like locket of Swiss clockwork that levered it shut!? As if anyone would notice that! That was just like Miwako, thinking all of them were just salivating to know everything there was to know about her ten-thousand-and-twenty-yen, made-in-Milan, imported-on-a-Thursday-in-April-so-she’d-had-to-skip-luncheon-duty-to-pick-it-up umbrella!) and had to pretend to ignore her for all of the twenty-seven seconds necessary to duck into the water cooler enclave and check her reflection in the side of a vending machine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the other half of the summer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nonakani](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonakani/gifts).



> dear Nonakani, i loved getting to spend time with the fantastic baseball parents' association of Nishiura in the course of writing this, and hope you will too! thank you very much for such a lovely request about my favorite thing in the world, compelling minor characters.
> 
> thank you as always to Kuruk, for reassuring me through increasingly frenzied iterations of this fic, and Reo, for ideas, commiseration, and information. 
> 
> enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

**I.**

 

 

 

 

The day after the Bijou game, when Kiyoe knocked on Fumiki’s door with the laundry basket, he shrieked, “I’m _sulking_!” Offended, she yelled back, “So am _I,_ ” and he shouted that in that case why had she knocked on his door in the first place, she loftily attested that it’d been an _accident_ and his door had been in the _way_ of her extremely crowded and cluttered _life_ , he said he wouldn’t have opened it even if she _had_ knocked on purpose anyway, she banged on it petulantly for about five minutes straight until his sister came over from her own room churlishly sporting a pair of giant headphones (as though there was some kind of _cacophony_ going on in their pleasant and idyllic house! completely unreasonable!), snatched the laundry basket, and stalked off irritably. They commiserated through the closed door about how high-strung she was, and then, after a knot of seething, farcical silence that stood in for truce, she brought her mending over, slid her back down the shaft of the doorjamb, and sat there propped against it, redoing the stitching on Fumiki’s battered #7 while from inside he tossed a ball against his ceiling, the sound a metronomic counterpoint to the quiet that spread suddenly between them, like a pat of melting butter. 

“Don’t tell me to do this outside!” he said eventually. “I mean, like! In case you were going to!”

“I wasn’t going to do that! Why would I do that!?” Now she had to wait at least seventeen minutes to do it. “You’re always underestimating meeee—“

“I mean it!” he insisted. There was a shuffling thump, as though he’d fallen off the bed and bodily dragged himself over to the door instead of getting up. “Kaa-chan! Losing in the tournament…it’s an important sulking, okay! I’m—“ he lowered his voice “—becoming a _man—”_

Kiyoe bit off one of her stitches. This looked nonchalant and elegant when Hanai Kikue did it but in her attempt at it resulted in the thread becoming stuck between two of her teeth. She panicked for a moment before deciding that if Miki came out again, she could pretend she was just doing a bit of after-lunch flossing, then realized this did not solve the problem of what to do about the thread in the first place. Did _Miki_ know how to sew? Did Fumiki!? She was not only a failure as a seamstress, but a failure as a parent! What did Fumiki know anyway, he’d just lost a baseball game, but obviously it was _her_ life that was falling apart, or rather _unraveling,_ like the thread she didn’t actually know how to use and had now ensured her children would never know either!

She bashed at the closed door with her shoulder in sudden existential panic.

“Scissors!” she cried, around the thread in her mouth. “Don’t open the door, though!”

“What? Why not?”

“Because you’re sulking,” she said hurriedly. The ball banging at the ceiling stopped and a few moments later a pair of silver scissors slid under the door. She conducted the necessary operation in portentious silence, then decided that this was not the right ambience for embarking upon her resolution to be a better model parent, and said, “Fumiki!”

“Uh-huh—“

“Fumiki, if I don’t teach you how to sew, you should just—just take that big spoon in the kitchen, the one I half melted because, well, it doesn’t _look_ like plastic, does it? I mean, I don’t think it—well anyway, you should take that spoon and just beat me with it! Like an egg! Do you beat an egg? Or maybe you whisk it. Ahh! anyway, what I’m _saying,_ is—even if you lost against these Bijou whatevers—make sure you still teach your kids how to sew, because—“ Was that what she was trying to say? “Well, no, that—okay, you should, well. You can sulk again. I’m just…going to think about my life…”

The door slid open a crack. Through it she could see Fumiki’s huge round eye. When Kiyoe was young people used to tell her she had the most expressive eyes she’d ever seen, but they’d never met anyone like Fumiki, that was the thing. She didn’t know a lot but she knew no one had ever met anyone like Fumiki. When you had eyes like that, you didn’t dissemble because you couldn’t, you had to tell the truth all the time, set it there in the open in incontrovertible fact for others to laugh at, and eventually that was something you got used to.

A person could get used to not being too good at anything, really. That was what she was trying to say.

“You’re doing it upside down,” said Fumiki.

She stared at it in horror: it was true. They looked at it for a few seconds. Fumiki edged the door open a little more, and eventually she could feel his cheek against her shoulder, warm and a little clammy. If he’d been crying before, she hadn’t heard it at all; sometimes she thought this was what their growing up meant, that they kept finding new ways to hide their crying from her, when as children they used to scream without shame.  

“I made them laugh,” he said suddenly, apropos of nothing. “I mean—I didn’t mean to. I knew we were going to lose, I wasn’t trying to be funny or anything. Abe was like, laid out like he was _dying_ or something, he might even be dead _now_ , I read this thing once, about how like, if your wound gets _infected_ and then you get _gangrene_ or I don’t know, _cataracts_ or something. It was because I didn’t know what RICE was." 

“That’s ridiculous. Of course you know what rice is. You always have extra in your oyakodon.”

“I know, right?”

She picked up the silver scissors and ran them around the bottom of the #7, taking out a few of the stitches. She nearly couldn’t bring herself to; they’d been good stitches! Not crooked in the slightest. She thought of herself brandishing these stitches casually at the next baseball parents’ meeting, the #7 bright and wholesome on Fumiki’s back, and Hanai Kikue would say, oh! Kiyoe! where _ever_ did you learn to sew so _beautifully_?

“You think that’s all I’m going to get to do?” said Fumiki eventually. “I mean—instead of being a _man_. I’m just going to to be the one who makes them laugh.“

She looked at him in surprise, the round eyes, the clammy cheeks. The hair feathering down over his face that he absolutely would not let her touch under any conditions but she didn’t need to to know the texture of it coming home on a drizzly day, or matted under a helmet, or gelled and laid in careless curls for a cultural fair, because it was her hair too. He’d opened the door, she knew, because he could hear her through it, because he knew there was something going on on the other side that he couldn’t understand but could make his opinions about, the way at Bijou she’d seen the moment of resolution before he’d firmed up to hit their second pitcher’s fastest pitch. Only a momentary slice of an image, a preview of what he’d become, but this, too, something he couldn’t hide.

“That’s a lot,” she said finally. “Hey, Fumiki! What makes you think that’s not a lot?”

 

 

 

 

**II.**

 

 

 

 

The day after the Bijou game, Kazumi came home from work to find Shintaro taking boxes of manga out of the library and setting them in the hallway. _Baseball manga_ had been clearly labelled in their own box, but that old pitcher standby _Major_ had apparently warranted its own designation, _MAJOR: PLEASE KEEP ALL VOLUMES TOGETHER_ , this probably influenced by the time when an out-of-print volume had been lost mid-read and nine-year-old Shintaro had spent three weeks sobbing softly into his pillow before they’d tracked it down from a questionable secondhand retailer. _Aim for the Ace_ and _Eyeshield 21_ had stayed on their shelves, presumably because tennis and American football weren’t baseball, and this realization prompted her to go out and stand against the doorjamb, watching him count volumes in mullish silence, and finally say, “You have a new home in mind for these documents?”

His shoulders drew together in a petulant twist but he didn’t stop. “Takaya said his little brother likes them. I was thinking they’d be a nice present.”

“Who knows why. They all have exactly the same plot, don’t you think, Shin?”

When he was twelve, she’d enlightened him with this admittedly uninformed conclusion to needle him because he was so serious, but his expression had only approximated a polite, incredulous glower that could have held its own at any of the Senior Koshien League for the Advancement of Our Children’s finest charity luncheons (events which, like sports manga, she’d now partaken in enough of to comment on semi-authoritatively, as a responsible socialite and intrepid cartographer in the uncharted wilderness of baseball parental politics should—ha!).  He’d made a motion over his Jump that looked suspiciously like shielding something’s ears, and then he said—with a wounded gravitas she’d have clawed at anyone, absolutely _anyone,_ for laughing at—that it was nice she had shared her opinion…but they had better agree to disagree.

Now he only inclined his head thoughtfully, a noncommital acknowledgment he’d picked up since becoming a teenager, conveying the same sentiment of incredulous disagreement.

“What about your sister?”

“No, well—“ he wrapped up another three tankobon with red twine and set it in the box delicately, gently; she thought of the reverent way he’d handled his batting helmet when he’d brought it home, sponging it down and laying it on a towel after every practice. “Shun-chan already plays baseball, so.”

“You don’t think Eiko will?" 

“She’s eight,” he said. “It’s probably too late. You should probably start when you don’t know it’s possible _not_ to play baseball, else you’re never going to catch up, and then you’ll just cause problems for the rest of your team, and when there’s a clutch situation they’re going to put her in and she’s going to choke, so—I just thought. There’s no reason for her to be selfish.”

These were all words he’d learned recently: _choke_ , _clutch._ They sounded unexpectedly brutal; the more circuitous terms were more suited to a child who had always used such pleasant terminology, been complimented for his way with words: _perform poorly under pressure_ , _game-changing situation_. 

Kazumi played with the sleeve of her cardigan. The summer heat felt trapped under it, coming to curdle against her skin, giving her the same sense of claustrophobia she’d felt in the bleachers, watching him stride out and able to read, even at so many hundreds of paces, the terror in his body. _Cheer!_ Mizutani Kiyoe had cried. _You have to cheer_! but how could she have, through the cottony fear knotting her own throat. _Choke_ was the correct word. _Clutch_ , for what she’d wanted to do, around those shaking shoulders.

“All right,” she said finally. “All right. Let me give you a hand, then. I’m sure you’re still sore.”

They worked quietly and well, stacking the books in tetris formations to ensure that every corner of the boxes were filled up, leaving no room for insects or stale air. They stacked them in a parallelogram of buttery light that illuminated the side of the library, against the rice-paper division. Their movements had the energy that they’d always had, a perfect team since he was a paltry two or three and would sit in her shopping cart quietly observing a small stem of broccoli she’d select for him to hold while she worked through the rest of the list. She hadn’t known, then, to be stunned at the largeness of his hopes.

What she kept turning over was a vague memory of the summer of his tenth year, when she’d left law school, crushed by the competition and too stunned to be miserable yet. It was the year his sister was born, and she’d spent that summer’s worth of afternoons as she imagined a hermit crab bereft of its shell must, hunched, desolate but most of all brimming with a helpless rage at the circumstances that had landed her there, divested quite suddenly of her last, calcified bulwark against the future. For some reason she kept remembering how on one of those unremarkable afternoons he came in holding his Shonen Sunday between his textbooks, wholly out of breath running even that small distance, but something—some story in one of those manga, probably, had inspired him to pick up his pace. His body, when he scooted up shyly to lay his forehead against her collarbone, was trembling, as though he’d run all the way home, and to Kazumi, who’d spent all day viewing it as a place she wanted only to leave, there was a comfort to this.

She could say none of this now, of course, only watch him stack up the shape of his hopes now, compressing them down to their smallest size. They began to take the boxes outside to the sloping step that served as a porch. They took one, and then another. It was only at the third that he began to cry, and then she knew it was the right time to touch him. _Clutch_. She drew him to her, and marveled that his humiliation sounded just like his frustration at the lost volume had: that old, childish anger at not knowing what would happen next.

When you told people your son had joined baseball in high school because of _sports manga_ , they inevitably declared him absolutely adorable, but what a thing it was—far too powerful to be encapsulated by a word like _adorable_ —to be the parent of a child who took risks based on optimistic, meticulously whitewashed fictional depictions of realities he knew nothing about, beautiful rules that didn’t apply to end-of-summer tournament games! What did you do, then, with your own knowledge of what disillusionment might do to him—him who had never ranked lower than third in his class, never faced difficulty at anything he chose to try before?

Shin, she wanted to say. A lot of things might happen to you, if you’re denied something you’ve been led to believe is without flaw, something everyone around you is insistent on believing is without flaw. For instance, you might—shave all your hair off! You might grow a _beard_! You might, you might. You might refuse to accept your teammates’ pity after a humiliation, in favor of, say. Being unable to look anyone in the eye. Locking yourself in your house for a summer after your own failure, resentful of the sunlight and the emptying space of the emptied countertop. A terminal benchwarmer in your own life. Holding your son’s Shonen Sunday open in your lap and seeing only the reassurance you saw everywhere else that everything was fine—everything was _fine—_ if it wasn’t you hadn’t worked hard enough, strong enough, well enough, everything was fine, it was you, then, that must be the problem. It was you that must be the exception to the beautiful rules.

I don’t know baseball, but I know all that. Shin, believe I know all that.

She didn’t say any of it. She wasn’t Shintaro, had never had the knack of his unexpected, _unexpectable_ bravery. She drew him to her, and then she took the box out of his hands, and set it behind her, close enough to the door for it to be inside the house. He resisted for a moment, and then he let her do it.

“I spent a _lot_ on that volume of Major,” she said. “And we had to spend three weeks trying to find it. Abe Shun can come over here and read it if he wants.”

He laughed a little, through his tears. He blotted them away with the heel of his hand. The next day he would return to practices where most of them would ignore him, wouldn’t think to realize that he’d cried for them and for himself, but she would know. The pride inside her chest was belated and quiet, what she imagined the other mothers felt in the bleachers, watching their sons hit home runs: a tremor that spread tendrils.

“I missed that last pitch because it was a sinker,” he said. “You know—sinkers always turn out better when the pitchers throwing them are a little worn out? Because they can’t put too much power into it and overthrow it. I didn’t think about that, I just panicked.”

She didn’t take the bait, didn’t poke at the wound. She tossed her hair out of her eyes and affected the gentle intellectual curiosity that had been manageable for them since he was a child, and would continue to be manageable all the way through this baseball phase, and even after. If it didn’t remain a phase. “A sinker?”

“Yes. It’s a ball that—“

“Oh, I know what it is. Where do you think you got to be such a dab hand at flashcards, anyway? It’s the _name_ —sinker. No wonder you didn’t recognize it.”

“What?”

She reached behind her, groping at random for a volume in the box. She flipped through it. “Look at this. Shouldn’t it be called something like—you know—“ she thought wildly. “BREAKING DEVIL WHIRLPOOL BALL! of LIGHTSPEED! or something? I thought that was what baseball attacks were like. What do you mean, they’re not like that?”

“Stop it!” He took it from her laughing, and from the simple possessiveness she knew the book wasn’t going anywhere. “Don’t call them _attacks_!”

“You learned them that way before you learned them this way, that’s all I’m saying. Easier to remember. Shin, one would think you don’t even know how to _study_.”

“Okaa-san, those aren’t _real_. I know that now, I’m—an actual baseball player.”

“Oh, _are_ you. Those are stories, you know! They’re not _yours_!”

“Breaking devil whirlpool ball! Of _lightspeed_!”

“Laugh all you want, you’ll remember next time. I’m going to set up a baseball cram school, how’s that. You’ll never forget any of it again.”

He was still laughing when he took the book into the house, clutching it to his chest. She stayed out on the step for a little while longer. She took her cardigan off and let the day prickle on her forearms.

She thought she wouldn’t tell him now but might when he was older, what had come to drape over her mind when she saw him squinting in the dugout, at remove from the shameless sunlight that soaked and drenched every other corner of the verdant field. There he was, only a child again, struck like a tuning fork in his bones by the sonic boom of what had happened somewhere outside what he knew. And she—she was still there, in the bleachers instead of at the countertop, and she’d felt the dust in his mouth as he shouted in the base-coach’s box, all that he’d gotten of that field stamped down and run across and marked indelibly by every player’s feet except his own, a bitterness that she prayed wouldn’t take on the taste of his frustration the way hers had all that summer long. She didn’t know baseball, but this was what she knew: there was no one alive who knew better than he and herself what it was like to feel, without understanding, a story that was not your own.

 

 

 

 

 

**III.**

 

 

 

 

The day after the Bijou game, Kikue saw Miwako at the batting cages with her everpresent umbrella (inside an air-conditioned _room!_ was she trying to _show off_ her umbrella, its specially commissioned silk coverlet with embroidery in plasticine beads and the delicate, doll-like locket of Swiss clockwork that levered it shut!? As if anyone would notice that! That was just like Miwako, thinking all of them were just salivating to know everything there was to know about her ten-thousand-and-twenty-yen, made-in-Milan, imported-on-a-Thursday-in-April-so-she’d-had-to-skip-luncheon-duty-to-pick-it-up _umbrella_!) and had to pretend to ignore her for all of the twenty-seven seconds necessary to duck into the water cooler enclave and check her reflection in the side of a vending machine. Hair wrangled into to its cool-mother state of casual-but-not-negligent waves, she sauntered back out, keeping a cool-mother distance from Azusa, and called out a cool-mother, “Miwako-senpai! Why, I’m surprised to see you here, Yuu-kun should be resting! He did _so_ well, after all, in the game yesterday!”

Miwako shifted the infamous umbrella. “Let’s go,” said Yuu to Azusa instantly, and in a rare display of fraternity they rocketed off, strapping on their helmets as they went. This was enough distraction for Miwako to formulate her reply, which she fired off with characteristic serenity.

“Not as well as Azusa. He was playing his absolute best, I could just tell. It’s surprising they still lost, Kikue-chan, don’t you think?”

A searing missile, perfectly couched in an inoffensive platitude! It was positively virtuosic. There was a reason Miwako was the consummate baseball parent; Kikue would have bowed to her if it weren’t for the technicality of impending utter humiliation. She gritted her teeth, mentally flashcarding through complex permutations of compliments and jabs. And Azusa thought the season was _over!_ Ha! The season hadn’t even _started_!

“I’m always telling my poor boy, he should learn from Yuu-kun! That’s why he’s been practicing so hard, it’s like another cram school, really…of course, Yuu-kun doesn’t go to cram school, it’s evident, but why should he? He’s practically _guaranteed_ a sports scholarship! No need to worry about those grades!”

There! A definite jolt in the position of the umbrella! She, Hanai Kikue, was the upcoming baseball parent of the prefecture. The umbrella was now beginning to spin suspiciously, Miwako was almost definitely planning something sinister.

Kikue girded up for it, but to her disappointment Miwako only said, “Ah, well, he’s come with his own destiny, like everyone else,” and glided forward into the huge vaulted room where the batting cages were clustered, all on one side, like chunky necklaces that piled at the bottom of a jewelry box. The blast of air conditioning that raised goosebumps on her arms wasn’t affecting the children at all. Their bodies were slicked down wet with perspiration like seals, florescent light spilling off the fabric of the ultra-breathable, ultra-light athletic shorts they all wore.A few cages down from Azusa an older girl with a dyed highlight in her hair was lacing one line drive after another high into the exposed wiring of the lights, deliberately missing, it seemed, actually bludgeoning one of the bulbs. There was an artistry to that kind of recklessness that demanded attention and both Yuu and Azusa had their bats slung up on their shoulders, watching the perfect, parabolic trajectories with the same naked expression on their faces.

“It’s nice for them to see a senpai,” said Miwako next to Kikue, in a low voice. She’d folded the umbrella up and laid it on the bench, and was now mixing honeyed lemon solution into a cold thermos of tea. “That’s why I bring him here. They don’t have any, you know. I wonder if it’d have made a difference.”

She held out the cap of the thermos with the drink in it. It was as good a truce as any but so obvious Kikue was started for a moment before taking it, letting it cool the cupped space in her palms.

Why had she began taking Azusa to the batting cages? The why was so bound up with the when; he’d learned to hold a bat and wear a glove, and more, learned to say the word _Koshien_ , do everything all the other boys were doing except do it better. Boys would be boys. Didn’t people say it was good? Weren’t you supposed to be proud of it, if your boy was a baseball superstar, and your daughters were lovely ballerinas, you’d never _asked_ them if they both wanted to do it, but they were twins, they’d never said anything because they weren’t the saying type, and it did look so nice on your new years’ cards, what wasn’t to be proud of?

Now the girl with the highlight in her hair had stopped and was holding her cold water bottle against the back of her neck. Yuu had run over to her and begun pantomiming her long, self-assured swings, and slowly the expression of incredulity melted from her face, rearranging itself into indulgent excitement. This was how everyone reacted to Yuu. Kikue had gone to their practices more times than anyone else, brought more rice balls, sewn more uniforms, kept the bright light of her attention trained on Azusa struggling for words as Yuu darted about picking them up like coins off the dirty sidewalk, and she knew. This was how everyone reacted to someone who didn’t have to use any tactics.

The tea was tart and cool on her tongue, perfectly brewed. Patience between the interlocking flavors. A phenomenon. She could ask, but she knew already that she wouldn’t.

“Nothing’s going to make a difference except more practice,” she said shortly. “It doesn’t matter if they don’t win.”

“Well, in their free time—" 

“It’s not his free time,” she said, sharper than she’d intended. “Maybe it’s Yuu’s. It’s not Azusa’s. He’s—winning. He’s going to win.”

The older student had come over to Yuu’s batting cage and had put her hands on his shoulders, fixing his stance. She knocked his knees wider with the toe of her sneaker. She said something, leaned back, gathering her hair again into a shining ponytail. Yuu laughed, she laughed. They conferred together. They took practice swings at nothing. Smoothened, immaculate. Their confidence unraveling the kinks. In the cage next to them Azusa kept it up with the jerky, inconsistent jab that he’d affected by the seventh inning of the Bijou game. His ears were reddening. He could ask, but she knew already that he wouldn’t.

A shiver of goosebumps skated across her skin. The air-conditioning was far too high. She ducked her head, and took another sip of the tea.

They went on watching. Eventually Yuu took the bat into his hands, squinted at the coming pitch, and swung. There was a crack, ice cubes breaking in the stem of Miwako’s thermos, contained between her slender hands. Kikue hadn’t seen how it happened—hadn’t had the time— but the ball soared into the air to a firecracker chorus from the cages. It took her a moment to identify the sound of applause.  

“I have no doubt he will,” said Miwako gently.

 

 

 

 

**IV.**

 

 

 

 

The day after the Bijou game, Misae made a lunch for Naoe and herself and Takaya, who was at home: mackerel with a glaze of egg crumb over rice and a special spread of the vegetables Naoe had brought for her, the daikon a sunny gold and soaked in brine to the perfect tenderness, the carrots encased in soy wrappers and fried into crisp packets. It’d been a hot day and she’d felt glazed all over herself by the time she was finished, and Naoe poured one glass after another of watermelon sherbet for her, urging her to drink it before continuing her anecdotes about her students, her office hours, the new online discussion platform the university had implemented which she found so terribly cumbersome. By the time Takaya brought over his plate with its untouched vegetables on it and set it by the side of the sink Misae didn’t have the energy to say much more than, “You forgot these." 

“They were good.”

“Then why didn’t you eat them?”

He looked at her incomprehendingly. She had a wild moment of imagining throwing the plate against the wall, spattering Naoe’s creamy white laptop case with cooking detritus, she could have bought a laptop case like that, it would have looked wonderful with her black clothes, but Naoe had a place to wear it, and she did not, so it was a moot point, really, she thought with brittle brightness, composing herself enough to take the plate and scrape the vegetables off it into the trash. Both Takaya and Naoe watched her as she did this.

“You should have put them away," said Takaya, as if he would have. "I could have done that."

“You’re _injured_ ,” said Misae. She didn’t know where the emphasis was coming from. She hadn’t meant to add it. “You _injured_ yourself in a _game_ and now I’m taking _care_ of you. We all know how this works.”

“It’s about time for me to leave,” said Naoe.

“No,” said Misae, “you should stay. Taka should leave. Taka should go and rest, so he can go out and play baseball again as soon as he can and get another injury and I can take care of him, because that’s what I’m supposed to do. We’re all doing what we’re supposed to do.”

“Your skirt is beautiful,” said Naoe.

“If you’d wanted me to eat them—” began Takaya.

“So beautiful. The suede goes well with the tailored shirt. We all admire your impeccable sense of style, Misae.”

“Go away, Taka,” said Misae. “Go rest. I’m talking to my friend. Can’t you see that I’m doing that. Go away.”

She didn’t do anything until he was gone and then Naoe held her hand while she closed her eyes and the anger receded. She’d have taken the lifeline offered to her, let Naoe leave, refused to air her dirty laundry like any of the rest of them would have done, but what they didn’t tell you was that this was an endeavor that took  teamwork between you and a certain type of child, and that wasn’t the type of child that she had.

The summer stretched ahead of her with his absent, inexhaustible presence filling the house, its impersonal quality worse than adolescent belligerence. Suddenly she couldn’t bring herself to persevere with the bland, sunny affect she coated her days with otherwise to let them pretend she was as supportive as the rest of them. _Supportive_! they were always saying. _Support_ Takaya-kun in baseball…all we can do is _support_ them in their endeavors…here as a source of _support_ —a dull word, as it happened, for the neverending tedium of making videotapes, ferrying him to and fro from school at odd hours of the day and night when the metro didn’t run, cooking and ruining and cooking again batches of hundreds of rice balls, learning how to do icing and massage and weight-spotting, budgeting endlessly for cleats, socks, bats, helmets, videos, shoes, bags, and then, if any time at all was left over, perhaps, on the off chance, mustering up the gumption to attempt whatever serious and inspiring conversations about character-building parents were always having with their children in Naoe’s parenting manuals. Support! When had she contracted herself to supporting all of these things, the sheer _idea_ that all of this was worth supporting?

“I can’t do this,” she whispered. “Naoe, he—I’m not supposed to say it, I know I’m not, but he’s not learning _anything._ Wouldn’t _you_ know that? The way he deals with Ren? I apologized because I know. Now they’ve lost, and he _still—didn’t—learn—_ “

“Misae. They learn in their own time, you know that. Sometimes they don’t learn.”

“Then _why am I doing this_?”

“For the same reason I let Reiichi stay in Gunma, isn’t it,” said Naoe, keeping Misae’s hand in both of her own. “You made a choice.”

“He’s not—disrespectful, you know. It’s not that. He doesn’t even notice other people. I could have said something to him years ago, but then his father—and everyone telling him how _smart_ he is, how he’s wiling to do _anything_ to win, and—“

“Why don’t you ask him to quit?”

She ducked her head. Her hair swung in front of her face. She was supposed to find it charming, she knew. The self-absorbption, the hours and hours of unseen thankless labor.

“He _is_ smart,” she said. “And if he’s really willing to do anything—he can learn, too.” The first time she’d said it out loud.

After Naoe had gone she sat in front of her mirror and laid out her earrings. All some variation on the pearl and silver set she’d seen for the first time on a mannequin, when she used to take the train to her summer job doing alterations at a boutique as a teenager. She had little ones on a thread of wire, slightly bigger ones that swung from chain links. All kinds, really. She put one to her earlobe and set it down again. She brushed out her hair until it flared out from her temples, then trimmed off the flyaways with a small pair of haircutting scissors exactly like the ones she’d seen in a magazine years ago. From a magazine, too, a spread of an up-and-coming Shibuya rock musician, she’d copied the design of the tailored shirt with its oversized, raised collar, with the friezes of embroidery on the shoulders. She was older but her darts and basting still abided by the same principles she’d learned as a girl: flattering and flattening. She still looked very young, she thought, peering in the mirror.

Takaya’s face over her shoulder was so much like her own that it didn’t startle her when she saw it reflected, only continued brushing out her hair. He sat on the bed behind her, wincing on his knee. She watched him until he settled into the blankets. He’d never been the sort of child to come into her room when he was frightened; she’d always gone to him, anticipating it, and then he’d be there in his own room, expressionless the way he was behind his catcher’s mask: swallowing whatever fear was there.

“I’ve never seen that before,” he said abruptly, gesturing at his collar. She knew he meant the shirt. She closed her eyes.

“I made it,” she said. “While you’ve been at school.”

“You can’t really see the embroider…ing,” he said. “You didn’t really have to do it.” It was unexpected coming from him but delivered with his characteristic authority anyway. “I mean—it’s good you did, though. It looks different when you know it’s there. You know—what I mean.”

Her face, floating twice in the mirror. She sought his eyes in the reflection. The old tenderness came back slowly, exhausted; she had to wait a little longer for it—but it came.

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  

 

 

 

**V.**

 

 

 

 

The day after the Bijou game, Naoe put her hand out the window on the way back from Misae’s and felt a gilded, shining afternoon on her fingertips, the sun striking like a heartbeat against her outstretched hand. She called Ren and told him to get out his permit and put on sunscreen, and then picked him up and switched with him at home, letting him back the car out of the driveway, watching the horrified expression with which he turned to reverse. 

“Easy!” she said, laughing. “You don’t have to be _scared_ of it, it’s just in case anything’s coming.”

“What if s-something comes? Then do you—do you dodge?”

“Well, if you haven’t been looking, by that point it’s too late to _dodge,_ per se, probably—“

He squeaked and threw the car into drive, careening out of the residential area as though whatever he might have hit was lurking there, waiting to entrap him. Once he got to the thoroughfare he slowed down, inching along with the traffic, and she waited until he felt secure in his lane before she started to talk again. She set the paper with her directions on her lap and trailed her hand out the window, siphoning up the day.

They took one of the winding side roads down out of the city and drove through a grove of trees with a tourist path through it, miles and miles of a city-funded project that mimicked a traditional garden. Through the windows they saw ponds, bending trees with their tracery of light in the laced leaves. The sweep and gush of oars out on the little rivers where families rowed through the scenery. There was fall in the air now, the slip of cool wind braided into the humidity wood-scented, a novelty. She welcomed it.

“You know that when you were about to be born, I was still studying?” she said. “Take a right here, follow the byway. Indicate a little earlier, Ren.”

“S-studying…” 

“Yes. I had a cubicle, and when I was writing my dissertation I used to go into there and just—talk to you, you know, tell you about my spreadsheet program crashing on me, or a summary of the reading I’d done half of before your father forgot to renew my journal subscriptions.”

He laughed. It was the part of him that hadn’t changed at all since infancy; it’d seemed mature when he was little, it seemed adult now.

“Maybe you remember some of it, but you don’t know you do. Wouldn’t that be useful?”

“M-maybe,” he said. “Or maybe I was t-telling you about—pitching.”

“Maybe! Whoa, stay in your lane. Don’t go that far to the right. They won’t be able to do anything to you, nobody can take your place.”

“N-nobody took it,” he said.

She looked at him out of the corner of her eye; knew he wasn’t talking about the road. At Bijou he’d been the same, rallying them not because he consciously wanted to but because it was who he was, and she knew how he’d done it, knew what he knew as surely as if he’d still been someone she hadn’t met yet, curled under her palms in her belly: there was something empowering, of course there was, about the knowledge that no one could take your place.

The byway ended. They came out onto a highway that leveled the ground in front of them, concrete meeting the horizon. Ren slowed and pulled over, and the cars barreled forward ahead of him, into the place where the sun was already melting in the split-open sky.

“You know where this is?”

“It’s—the G-gunma highway. Are we going _there_?”

“No. But—I wanted you to know, you know. Now you know the way to get here. You’ll be able to go by yourself anytime you want.”

They pulled back into the turnabout to go home. Ren was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel the way Reiichi did, lost in his own thoughts but eyes fixed on the road. The other half of the summer, the half after you’d lost, stretched ahead of them. Naoe sat back as he pulled into his lane, closed her eyes and let her son ascertain the route home. Thought of that long-ago time, a young woman in her cubicle, feeling him stir under her skin, listening to her troubles. Now you know what it’s like here, she’d whispered, not with her voice anymore but with the mind that knew him, already, had begun to visualize the way his road would separate from hers. Now I've told you everything I can. Come out, and see the world that is here for you.

 

 

 

 

_the end_


End file.
